04.13.16

Sight Unseen Presents

Visit Us at Collective Design This May!

From May 4 – 8 at Skylight Clarkson Sq, we are thrilled to be showing at Collective again, spotlighting ambitious new work by independent American design studios on the rise. For our 2016 showcase, Bower x Studio Proba, Chris Wolston, Fort Makers, and Only Love Is Real will debut a collection of furniture and lighting set against a backdrop of custom wallpaper developed with our amazing sponsor Designtex especially for the show.

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04.13.16

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today: Day 2

Virgile Thévoz and Josephine Choquet are no strangers to Sight Unseen, but their latest collection, which is debuting at Rossana Orlandi as part of the "i Dream of Luxury" exhibition in Milan this week, might be our favorite yet. The two London-based designers know from high-end products, having studied in the Design for Luxury and Craftsmanship program at ÉCAL, and their new Cast Brass collection explores the effect of time on the value of an object. The polished brass accessories are half-cast in transparent resin blocs, allowing the exposed metal to oxidize over time and cast half to remain pristine and shiny forever.

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04.12.16

Up and Coming

This Former Acne Art Director Makes Furniture With a Graphic Eye

When we first encountered Swedish designer Erik Olovsson two years ago in the basement of Rossana Orlandi, he had but two products to his name — a wavy-lined metal and marble clothes rack and a modular, geometric shelving unit, both created in collaboration with his fellow graduate and graphic designer Kyuhyung Cho. Since then, Olovsson has been developing and tinkering with the beautiful projects he's unveiling in Milan this week.

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04.12.16

Sighted

Afternoon Sculptures by Erik Olovsson

Today on the site, we're featuring Swedish designer Erik Olovsson, who's debuting in Milan this week a collection of stools made from slatted pine and treated with various hues and patterns of screen-print dye. Olovsson's been documenting his experiments in color-treated on Instagram with the hashtag #afternoonsculptures, and we're excerpting a few of our favorites here today.

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04.12.16

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 1

Sight Unseen is on the ground at the Milan Furniture Fair this week and we’ll be bringing you loads and loads of coverage later this week! But until our rounds there are done, we’ll be featuring quick hits from some of our favorite things that caught our eye. First up: Ferrosecco, a collection of powder-coated steel vases and cups by Italian designer Federica Elmo, which we spotted at Ladies & Gentlemen, a show in the 5Vie area of Milan curated by Secondome and PS and featuring tons of SU faves like Studiopepe and Giorgia Zanellato. Love these pics, which are like mash-up of Meta Flora and Barbara Kasten.

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03.13.14

Sighted

Totokaelo Art—Objects’s Spring Campaigns

The cult Seattle boutique Totokaelo already carries clothing and objects so beautiful that each new season wreaks havoc on the wallets of aesthetes around the country. The only way the store could possibly improve on that game? By shooting those new collections in scenarios designed to make said aesthetes even crazier. To promote its spring Art—Object catalog, the store's creative director Ashley Helvey masterminded two such campaigns: a photo shoot shot by Robin Stein and styled by Margaret Macmillan Jones in the technicolor plaza of Seattle's King County Correctional Center (designed in the '80s by Martha Schwartz and Benson Shaw), and a video, also in collaboration with Stein, that features Cameron Mesirow of Glasser along with music from her latest album, Interiors.

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04.11.16

Sighted

A Design Legend in the Making Breaks Out On His Own

When we first heard rumblings that RO/LU — the epically talented, intellectually formidable Minneapolis-based studio that we've been covering and collaborating with since its move into furniture design five years ago — was ending, we were sad but also a little excited. After all, what would its multi-disciplinary founders get up to next? This week, we got our first glimpse into RO/LU co-founder and creative director Matt Olson's new studio, called OOIEE.

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04.09.16

Saturday Selects

Week of April 4, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we tried to restrain ourselves from posting all the Milan Furniture Fair goodness we've been gathering by sharing our top picks from Miart (above), plus recent examples of three trends we expect to see plenty of at the Salone next week: colored mirror, brushstrokes, and terrazzo.

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04.07.16

Up and Coming

Here’s (More) Proof That Dutch Design Has Gone Super Minimal

It’s rare to come across a body of work and a design approach as radical as that of Dutch designer Tijmen Smeulders. Give his portfolio a quick browse, and you'll find only the barest essentials: dimensions, material, and year of production. Focused on technical exploration and highly sculptural, his pieces offer the viewer no explanation of their existence or even a hint as to the concept behind them — they are pure form.

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04.06.16

Up and Coming

A New Berlin Creative Studio Puts the Art in Art Direction

Before forming the design studio Eurodance in Berlin last year, Tom Singier and Jean Leblanc worked as, respectively, an art director with his own gallery specializing in fine-art prints, and an illustrator for clients like Nokia and Louis Vuitton — hence they were both fully acclimated to existing in the grey area between form and function.

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04.05.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Series of Pastel Paintings, Inspired by Floridian Hues

In her colorful, line-driven work, Brooklyn artist Jesse Moretti has always explored the space between flatness and dimensionality, and the visual tricks one might use to create a bridge between the two. Her newest body of work, called FOAME — on view through Sunday at Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York — does so quite literally: In many of her paintings, Moretti employs a shadowy line that creates the illusion of a canyon carved into the wood — or, perhaps, like an X-acto knife cut into foam.

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04.04.16

Sighted

Seriously Modern Vibes From a Collection Inspired by Ancient Texts

With so many designers mining references from only the last decade or so, it can be weirdly refreshing to talk to someone like Nick Ross, whose influences run more towards Mesopotamia than Memphis. Ancient trade routes, Greek and Roman sculptures — these are the things that inspire the Stockholm-based, Scottish-born designer, whom we first featured when he was graduating from Konstfack a few years back. His thesis project there spawned an instant classic — the White Lies table, which features a marble-topped column with a richly saturated gradient fading down its trunk. Since then, Ross has been thinking about and working on this new collection, which he's debuting at the Milan furniture fair next week.

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04.01.16

Saturday Selects

Week of March 28, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Little glimpses into the past (1930s ziggurat bookends), present (the colorful Danish stools above), and future (Milan furniture fair preview) of design.

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